Yesterday was a big day, but I wanted to give the news time to shake out.
For “Valley Curtain” he strung orange nylon fabric along steel cables over a narrow pass in Rifle, Colo.; a large semicircular opening allowed cars on the state highway below to pass through.
Fierce winds ripped the curtain to shreds two days later, a setback that Christo shrugged off. “I as an artist have done what I set out to do,” he said. “That the curtain no longer exists only makes it more interesting.”
Then came “Running Fence,” a series of white nylon fabric panels that snaked their way over ranchland in Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California and crossed Highway 101 on their way to the ocean in Bodega Bay.
For “Valley Curtain,” Christo and his lawyer devised the system that made all of his subsequent works possible. For each project a corporation was created, with Jeanne-Claude as director and Christo as a salaried employee. Financing came from the sale of drawings and small models to collectors and museums; Christo never accepted grants or public money. When the art work was taken down, the corporation dissolved itself, having earned zero profit.
…
Even more difficult, politically, was Christo’s plan to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. The first drawing was made in 1971. For decades thereafter he encountered nothing but resistance from West German officials. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, momentum shifted his way, and in 1995 the work was completed.
In between the Pont Neuf and Reichstag Projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.
“The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A.” came to grief when one of the 485-pound umbrellas in California came unmoored in high winds and killed a woman and injured several other people. The two artists ordered the umbrellas in both countries to be taken down immediately. As a Japanese crane operator prepared to remove one of the umbrellas, his crane made contact with a power line, electrocuting him.
Herb Stempel, of quiz show scandal fame, has passed at 93. I’ve written about the quiz show scandal previously, so I won’t recap the whole story here.
Mr. Stempel apparently passed on April 7th, but his death was not confirmed until yesterday. It’s mildly interesting that he passed almost exactly a year after Charles Van Doren.